Ancient cultures have been practicing healing arts for as long as we have written historical records. Many of these practices eventually led us to the modern medical standards we appreciate today. Although they paved the way for modern medicine, some of those practices were not only counterproductive and harmful, but they were often quite odd. Thankfully, all of the following have fallen out of use.

10 Cutting Teeth
France

The term “cutting teeth” isn’t only an idiom that means learning basic skills in a new line of work; it used to be a medical practice. When a baby starts to grow teeth, we call this teething, but this word comes from a medical practice that began in France in the 16th century. When a baby’s teeth would begin the process of coming through the gums, doctors would take a scalpel and slice open the tissue over the teeth to allow them to come through. Cutting teeth began in France but eventually spread throughout Europe and into the United States.

The practice began with French doctor Ambrose Pare, who examined the corpse of a child in 1575. “When we diligently sought for the cause of his death, we could impute it to nothing else than the contumacious hardness of the gums . . . when we cut the gums with a knife we found all the teeth appearing . . . if it had been done when he lived, doubtless he would have been preserved.” Unfortunately, the practice of cutting teeth was performed until the early 20th century, though it was a hotly debated medical topic. It is unknown how many children died from teething, but the lack of sterile tools and the trauma inflicted on the young children often resulted in death.

9 Mouse Paste
Egypt

In ancient Egypt, many people who suffered from common ailments such as toothaches or earaches found that mice were the best answer to their problems. Toothaches were especially common in Egypt due to the prevalence of sand in their diet. Sand would get into almost everything, including food. Because of the grittiness of the sand, eating it would often wear down the enamel covering the tooth, which exposed the nerves and blood vessels.

For some reason, the Egyptians decided that dead and often festering mice were an effective remedy for this problem. The dead mice would be mashed into a paste and applied to the afflicted area. For serious toothaches, a whole dead mouse would simply be applied directly to the tooth. Common sense tells us that this treatment cannot have worked in curing the aching tooth, and it most likely caused more problems. Applying rotting tissue to exposed nerves and blood vessels is a pretty good way to turn a tiresome pain into a full-blown infection.

8 Clay Consumption
Greece

In ancient Greece, it was a common practice to consume a particular type of clay that was found on the Greek island Lemnos called terra sigillata. Disks of clay were exported and sold as a medical remedy for stomach problems and diarrhea.

While some people do still consume clay today for their own strange reasons, most people don’t recognize clay consumption as a viable medical practice. That being said, the clay found on the island of Lemnos contains kaolin and bentonite. These two elements are used in modern medicines to treat patients suffering from diarrhea. People like Hippocrates wrote about the benefits of ingesting this type of clay, and as it turns out, the most famous classical physician was correct—at least in the identification of healing properties through the consumption of the special clay. Similarly, bark from the willow tree is used today to make aspirin. This was also likely identified by the likes of Hippocrates, so while it is good that we don’t eat clay all that often, we do benefit from the ancient practice any time we have a touch of Montezuma’s Revenge.

7 Retribution Or Compensation
Mesopotamia

In Mesopotamia around 1700 B.C., King Hammurabi created a codex of laws, some of which may already be familiar, like “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Interestingly, when a surgeon performed a successful operation, he was awarded an appropriate amount of shekels relevant to the patient’s standing in the community. A failed or botched surgery might result in the loss of the doctor’s hand if the patient were of high standing and did not survive.

There were several types of doctors in ancient Mesopotamia. The ashipu, or sorcerer, would identify the patients’ ailments and determine which evil spirits inhabited them. They would then either prescribe spells or charms to expel the evil spirit or refer the patient to an asu, a physician. These physicians would apply herbal remedies and plaster casts to wounds.

The Code of Hammurabi directed retribution or compensation for surgeons only if they used a knife in their practice. This limited surgical options due to the understandable reluctance of a surgeon to cut a patient for fear of succumbing to the same fate. Since there was no prescribed retribution for non-surgical attempts, the asu treated their patients homeopathically more often than surgically.

6 Have Some Poo
Egypt

When we get eye infections these days, our first thought isn’t to rub animal dung into our eyes. The ancient Egyptians couldn’t say the same. The treatment for many ailments was, in fact, to rub the dung of various animals onto a wound or infection. Additionally, a mixture of dung and other ingredients was administered orally for myriad diseases and ailments. The dung of pigs, donkeys, lizards, and even children was used as an ingredient in various medicinal salves and oral treatments throughout ancient Egypt. One of the goals of Egyptian physicians was to create pus, which they believed was therapeutic in treating an infection. We now know that pus is merely a sign of infection, but the Egyptians were quite pleased with its presence.

Fortunately, we no longer rub poop into our eyes and wounds, but modern physicians do use feces in several medical treatments. To combat Clostridium difficile, which causes severe diarrhea and thousands of deaths per year, doctors implant feces into a patient’s bowels to replace the beneficial microbes lost during the course of the infection. New developments in this practice have led to the creation of frozen poop pills, which allow for the same treatment without the need to collect feces from a willing donor at the time of the procedure.

5 Partial Tongue Removal
Europe

Hemiglossectomy is a medical procedure that involves the removal of part of the tongue. It is practiced today for patients suffering from ailments such as oral cancer. The treatment works well in removing cancerous tissue, though it results in a visible deformity of the tongue. Fortunately, there are plastic surgeries and methods for improving the quality of life of patients who undergo hemiglossectomies.

Unfortunately for patents in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the treatment was less about dealing with cancer and all about correcting a stutter or stammer. That’s right—doctors thought that the best way to treat someone with a stutter was to cut off half of his or her tongue. Since this clearly didn’t work to fix a stutter and many patients died as a result infection and blood loss, you have to wonder how many times this was done before someone decided that it just didn’t work.

4 Tobacco
North America

For Native American societies, tobacco was considered one of the best medicinal remedies for anything from chronic pain to tuberculosis. The leaves were smoked, eaten, or ground up and applied topically. Today, we don’t think of tobacco as a healthy thing. We have known for decades that smoking tobacco leads to ailments like lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases, but the tobacco in cigarettes is laced with an incredibly high amount of chemicals. The tobacco used by the Native American population for medicinal purposes was pure.

Even pure, tobacco is still a dangerous plant and can be hazardous when used medicinally. Doctors in the 19th century believed that the plant was capable of treating a number of ailments—ringworms, constipation, hernias, infections—when taken orally or rectally, or applied externally.

That being said, nicotine and tobacco are addictive substances. We don’t advocate their use, especially for medicinal purposes. If you would like to quit smoking, research smoking cessation and ask your doctor for help.

3 Grub Salves
Aboriginal Australia

The ancient Aboriginal Australians would grind up the grub worms of the witchetty moth (Endoxyla leucomochla) and use them as a salve for skin lesions and wounds. They would pack the crushed worms into any cut or abrasion that required healing. The paste made from the grub worms would actually help in the healing process. Once packed into a wound, a bandage would then be applied and the combination would keep out air and bacteria, which aided in healing.

Today, the grub is not used medicinally like it used to be, but it has become a staple in many aboriginal diets. Present-day Aborigines harvest and cultivate the moths. “Moths were cooked in sand and stirred in hot ashes, which singed off the wings and legs. Moths were then sifted on a net to remove their heads. In this state, they were generally eaten, although sometimes they were ground into a paste and made into cakes.” The grubs are considered a delicacy and if you ever visit one of these tribes, expect to be offered one. It is considered rude to refuse, so be prepared to chow down on one of these little buggers!

2 Counter-Irritation
Worldwide

The practice of counter-irritation makes a little bit of sense. When you scratch an itch, you are producing a counter-irritation to your skin; essentially causing a new irritant which is less painful or annoying than the initial itch you needed to scratch. In ancient medical practice, counter-irritation was far more nefarious. When someone sustained an injury, it was common practice to cut into the injury further and often reopen the wound on a daily basis to pour various concoctions into it—all in the hope that the new irritant would help to relieve the patient of the old irritant.

There are some modern examples of counter-irritation in medicine and homeopathy, like acupuncture. “Some proponents argue that the needles may stimulate the release of pain-killing natural chemicals, relax tense muscles, or inhibit the conduction of pain through counter-irritation. “

Additional examples of counter-irritation that are no longer recognized as medically viable are inserting a patient’s inflamed limbs into anthills. If no anthills were available, practitioners used to create blisters with a hot iron or acid. Another method of “Counter-irritation involved making a saw-shaped wound and inserting dried peas or beans into it. The doctor would then ensure the wound remained open, keeping it from healing, from weeks to months, replacing the peas and/or beans as necessary.” Leeches were also used as a means of bloodletting topically, orally, and vaginally to relieve “sexual excitement” in women.

1 Castration
Assyro-Babylonia

Medicine wasn’t always a science. In ancient Assyria and Babylon, it was more of a magical and spiritual exercise. Castration wasn’t a normal practice of the Assyrians or Babylonians outside of medicine. Generally, the removal of the testes was performed by a physician for one of a number of reasons, but the most common was to allow men to work in the harem as eunuchs. This wasn’t always voluntary. Unlike the harems in Turkey, which required the removal of both the penis and testicles, the Assyrians and Babylonians only required the removal of the testicles. Removal wasn’t necessarily always done and on occasion, “testicles were crushed or damaged in such a way as to destroy the function of the seminal ducts.” (Getting them removed is one thing, but the idea of having them crushed ought to make your stomach turn.)

The practice of castration was solely done by medical professionals only as a last resort and almost entirely for the creation of a eunuch. The Assyrians and Babylonians were very concerned with the nature of male genitalia because they were aware that they were integral in human reproduction.

In Assyria, it was a severe criminal act to damage a man’s testicles. If a woman were to crush a man’s testicle in a fight, she would have a finger cut off. If both testicles were damaged, both of her nipples would be torn off.

Castration isn’t normally performed for medicinal purposes any longer, but it has been administered via chemical castration as punishment for sexual crimes.

I am an amateur graphic artist, illustrator, and game designer with a few independently-published games through my game company, TalkingBull Games. I enjoy researching and writing about history, science, theology, and many other subjects.

Crime is inevitable, even in a world run by Pilgrims and Puritans. Where there is crime, there is punishment. Starting back in 1608 with our first documented execution, America established a penal system based on Old English ideals. This made way for some pretty not-so-great methods of punishment when it came to the New World.

During our country’s birth, incarceration was an alien concept. We may have over two million people in prison currently, but our founders did not see imprisonment as beneficial. Swift punishments meant you paid a fine, were physically brutalized, publicly shamed, or executed.

Here are 10 punishments that thankfully ended in order from bad to “oh dear God, why?”

10 Stocks

The stocks are probably the most recognizable colonial time punishment. Also known as the pillory, the stocks held your hands and head in a wooden vice so that you could not move, and you were placed in town for all to see. People were encouraged to throw trash, stones, and other things that shouldn’t be held, let alone thrown. The wooden pillory was actually an altered version of the English bilboes, which were iron rods with shackles meant to keep the victim’s arms up while being chained to their feet. However, metal was expensive, so they moved to wooden stocks instead.

In comparison to many of the other possibilities, being put in the stocks wasn’t so bad. However, what seemed to be common was that during the colonial period, punishments were thrown together like a painful, forced repentant salad. The stocks were often paired with branding, ear cropping, or whipping. In some rare instances, the stocks could be fatal due to items being missiled at the prisoner. ^[1]

9 Flogging

Flogging, or whipping, was the prom queen of penance. There was a post in town for the sole purpose of whipping criminals publicly. Besides colonists just not having much else to do in their free time, public penance was popular due to the idea that people were unmalleable. With most laws being religiously centered, whipping was also a popular choice because it was believed to awaken the spirit and remind the soul that they were to serve God. This was also justification for whipping disobedient children.

Flogging could be done with a variety of items, including whips, sticks, and a multiple rope tool called a cat-o-nine-tails. Whipping was for lower-class citizens and slaves, and because they made up the bulk of the population, it could be seen frequently. As with the stocks, death was extremely rare and not the end goal of a flogging. In most cases, the scars from a whipping could be hidden, so moving on wasn’t impossible. With the next punishment, that was not the case.^[2]

8 Branding

In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne was lucky that her branding was just wearing the letter “A,” not having an A burnt into her forehead. The word “brand” has several origins, one being the Old English word for “destruction by fire,” and it worked just like it does with cattle. The metal letter is heated and pressed to the skin to make a scar. Different letters were used for different crimes. You could read it like a children’s book: “A” for adulterer, “B” for blasphemer, “D” for Drunk, “F” for forgery, and “T” for thief.

Another letter commonly branded was an “R,” which stood for runaway. Slaves were very often sentenced to physical punishments over very small indiscretions. If they tried to escape, then an “R” was branded on their foreheads. Foreheads and cheeks were popular burn sites depending on the crime. Some perpetrators could sometimes plead for mercy and get branded on the arm or hand instead. Being marked for life was not something one would relish, but a scar left behind doesn’t seem as bad as losing a whole body part. For example, an ear.^[3]

7 Ear Cropping

A man in England who lived during King Henry VIII’s reign made the mistake of saying he thought the king was dead. Well, the king was alive, and saying otherwise was treason. To the pillory he went, and his ears were nailed to the stocks. After a day passed, his ears were cut off, and he was free to go. The thing about this was the ears were going to be taken no matter what, but the goal was to make the sufferer rip their own ears off trying to escape.

There was no overarching system of rules when it came to sentencing a punishment. There was no consistency in what was considered cruel versus just. Even within a sentence of ear cropping, there were variations. Sometimes the ears were hammered to the stocks, sometimes they were straight-up removed, and sometimes only pieces were removed. As with branding, losing one’s ears was not only painful but also humiliating. Hiding your earless new look was not easily done.^[4]

6 Branks

Although arguably not as painful as losing an ear, the brank is something straight out of a horror movie. The mix of pain with the avert humiliation of the brank makes it one of the more egregious punishments. It was used for those who spoke out against the church, gossiped, or nagged. It was known as the “gossip bridle” or “scold’s helm.”

An iron cage was placed over the accused person’s head with a plate stuck into their mouth that held their tongue down. Sometimes the plate was adorned with spikes. Almost always, the plate was large enough to cause hours of gagging while wearing it. To make the brank even more degrading, it could be topped with a bell so everyone would know you were approaching or a leash to be walked through town.

There is not much documented on the brank being used in colonial America, not as much as there is on them being used in Europe, at least. However, there are records of its use, especially with slaves. One of the reasons the brank could be so horrible was there wasn’t a set time limit. Maybe you were in the brank for a few hours, maybe days. Branks were mostly for women, as was the next punishment.^[5]

5 Ducking

The terms cucking stools and ducking stools are used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Cucking stools were seats that the victim was strapped to and paraded through town. Ducking stools were the same construction, only they were placed at the end of a lever that moved up and down, dunking the person strapped in underwater. The ducking stools became so popular that Maryland eventually passed a law that all counties must have a ducking stool.

Like the brank, ducking was used mostly as a recourse for women criminals. The result of the ducking stool was supposed to be a confession from the accused or an agreement to repent for their crimes. There was no set time limit for the stool nor time to be held underwater. Casualties resulted because of this. Ducking was not supposed to be fatal, but sometimes the victim would die of shock or drowning.

All these mentioned were punishments meant to scare, harm, and humiliate. Now we move to the darker side of corporal punishment. Spoiler alert: everyone dies at the end.^[6]

4 Hanging

Hanging was the most common method for a sentence of death in Colonial America. It was used if someone committed a heinous crime such as murder, infanticide, rape, or other sex crimes. A seventeen-year-old boy from Plymouth was found guilty of several counts of buggery (bestiality, in this case), including a horse, a cow, two goats, five sheep, and a turkey. I’m not sure how these animals were calculated so succinctly, but he was hung to death, and the animals were buried alive as the good Lord intended.

Hanging could be sentenced for men and women alike, and sometimes even children. During the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730), hanging was the main form of execution for those convicted. It is estimated that 10% of the pirate population in the Caribbean during this time met the gallows in America.

Generally, the hangman was not a professional but just a law figure within the colony or a judge. This less-than-ideal experience almost certainly led to more botched hangings than successful ones. If the rope was too short, the criminal’s neck wouldn’t break, so they would strangle to death. If it was too long, they might get beheaded. Which leads us to beheadings.^[7]

3 Beheading

“Off with their heads!” is one of the most known lines in literature or from a Disney film, depending on your taste. During Colonial America, it was shameful when your severed head was posted publicly. In contrast, for most of history, beheading was reserved for the upper class and seen as honorable in Europe. If it was done correctly, it was a swift and quick death.

However, the neck is not as fragile as one may think. Just like hangings, there wasn’t anyone trained in the art of beheading. This increased the likelihood of needing more than one attempt at decapitation, creating a need for multiple swings or repeated use of the guillotine. In some instances, the blade hit the head, not the neck.

Despite the possibility of a botched beheading, it was still preferred in England and the colonies to the alternatives. Anne Boleyn, for instance, was charged with treason and adultery. King Henry VIII could have chosen her to be burned at the stake or decapitated. For the victim, it seems like an easy choice.^[8]

2 Burning at the Stake

Fire is argued as the thing that separates man from animals. The control of fire has been used for good and for horrifically bad. There is a misconception that Colonial America came to its roots of burning at the stake during the Salem Witch Trials. The problem is Salem hung their witches. This does not negate the fact that burning at the stake was a not-so-rare method of capital punishment and a brutal one at that. From the ancient world, it moved into Europe and became the symbol of anti-religious punishment. Heretics, blasphemers, and rebels were burned.

Like so many other laws and punishments in our country, being burned at the stake has a racist history. Most women who were burned at the stake were black. White women convicted of the same crimes were generally hanged. Homosexuals also had to fear the fire. Due to the religious foothold of the colonies, homosexuality was punished by burning. If you were lucky, you were granted some sort of mediation to your death. For instance, sometimes, the victim would be strapped with gunpowder so that it would explode once the heat got to a certain level and kill them instantly.

1 Drawn and Quartered

“Hanged, drawn, and quartered” sounds like an album put out by a B-rated punk band. But no, it was a form of torturous death. The sentenced criminal would be hanged, taken down from the gallows alive, have their limbs tied to four horses, and then ripped into four parts. Another variation included being drugged to the gallows by a horse, hung til almost dead, then disemboweled publically. Afterward, the corpse would be quartered.

This form of capital punishment was not a popular one and seemed to be mandated more by English occupants than actual settlers. Because of this, treason was the number one crime that was eligible for being drawn and quartered. In England, hanged, drawn, and quartered punishment was reserved only for men who were found guilty of treason. With little documentation on how exactly this was adopted in colonial America, it’s fair to say it was the same procedure.

There were dozens of punishments that would be considered cruel and unusual by today’s standards. There are references to colonists using the breaking wheel and boiling victims in oil. Both are adopted from Old England’s torturous methods of the 1500s, and both seem almost too much for us to consider as part of our heritage. Without detailed records on them, they didn’t make the list. I think we have been through enough heartbreak anyway.

Before we harshly judge the settlers and their methods of punishment, we must remember they were living in very hard times or had just survived being starved, frozen, and constantly surrounded by death for months at a time. Racism and fear also lent to the horrific practices of our penal system.^[10]